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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

I think the most important point that I don't see discussed is that we shouldn't be compromising our ability to make food until we have viable non-Nitrogen based alternative fertilizers of comparable cost. Food is already too expensive, and now they want to crush poor people even more?

I think the farmer's have a good point here. I don't think the people dismissing this as farmers being anti-climate change realize the implications.

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90% of the food produced here is exported. This tiny country is the second biggest food exporter on the planet... The result is that our nature is destroyed, and that we can't build any more houses to solve our massive housing crisis.

Is there no land to build on left as everything is agriculture?

Every cm2 has been allocated and changing it will take something away to be replaced by something else, either water as land, agriculture as houses or any other flow you can imagine (and they all have been done).

If people have nowhere to live some non-farm land could be reallocated - but, yes, sure it'd be a fight.

No it's a legal problem. The Netherlands decided it would be a great idea to have 150+ nature preserves in one of the most densely populated countries in the world. European law requires the Netherlands to protect these areas from nitrogen deposition (NOx, NH3). A Dutch judge declared the Netherlands has to comply with this European law so now no activity that causes any nitrogen deposition can get a permit even if building houses is less than 1% of NO2/NH3 emissions. It's a mess created by a government 20 years ago.

That would sound like a fixable policy problem by changing laws etc.

Unfortunately those laws are European and we do not have much to say about it anymore since the government wanted to milk the Natura2000 subsidies (sidenote they also went to farmers).

if your situation is anything like the USA - those payments went to corporate farms, not family farms.

If you put it like that, less agriculture in such a densely populated country doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

But you're absolutely right; it's a mess that has been left to fester for far too long. A previous law, that was struck down, allowed farms to expand on the assumption that those expansions would at some later time result in less nitrogen. That of course didn't happen, but massive farm expansions have been driven through that loophole. Farmers have also been misled by banks wanted to fund those irresponsible expansions.

Even with all the agricultural lands Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries.

The issue is that our the lack of cheap land actually made our agricultural sector very competitive. They need high yields to be viable, so they made the investments (equipment, r&d) to have extremely high yields.

More than 80℅ ends up being exported.

That would mean they are making other countries food cheaper as well.

They have crippled many countries ability to produce food, see documentary: "Tomatoes and greed – the exodus of Ghana's farmers"

Probably cheaper for some in the short term, but it means less food security, and potential growth

The real problem is how agriculture is being subsidised. I'm not sure how it currently is, but for a long time, it was simply production that was subsidised, leading to excessive overproduction, which was then dumped below market prices on the African market, driving farmers there out of business.

Instead, these subsidies should be tied to sustainable agriculture. Support farmers by rewarding them for a cleaner, more sustainable business. Instead, many of these subsidies have gone to massive industrialised polluting megafarms.

If these were staple foods, that would be a concern - like the effect of Ukraine's wheat exports to Africa. Other countries not getting as much Dutch cheese is not the same kind of issue at all.

That's not accurate. Netherlands is only the sixth biggest food exporter. They are second in the EU.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-american-food-giant-...

I think Netherland is the second largest agricultural exporter by value, but I suspect that includes flowers, and isn't just limited to food.

Yes, that's correct. But the comment I replied to specifically mentioned food. The nitrogen emissions policy at issue here primarily impacts livestock and not flowers.

For a country of slightly less than 18 million people this is still mighty impressive.

Our nature is not destroyed. That's what the left city people say who never leave their cities. There is also plenty of room to build. But those same people want their children to grow up next to their cities. Thats not gonna happen. Enough room in other provinces. Another problem is mass immigration. Millions entered our country in the last 30 years.

Source?

Can you let us know how you do industrial scale dairy without pollution then, because it sure causes pollution everywhere else in the world

Environmental impact is a scientific fact, while both of your claims are lies often coming from the FvD side of things.

Look up the official numbers before you blindly repeat "millions entered the country". Because millions also left the country. The balance was below zero in the first part of this century. Has only been significantly above zero last year, and was small in many other years.

That seems like creative accounting. A lot of food is refined in Holland for export, but the raw material isn't necessarily grown there.

Source?

Chocolate for example.

Yes beef is technically homegrown but the stuff that cows eat is imported from Brasil. Dutch farming is not self sustaining.

What I haven't heard much about in the whole hubbub about this is that there's a lot that farmers can already do to reduce various nitrogen emissions. Different (less protein-rich) food and letting cattle graze outside have significant impact.

The discussion seems to have been dominated by people who just want to cut back on farming, and fans of highly industrialised farming. There are alternatives, and they're not getting enough attention.

Not all farmers support this new "farmer's" party. And big agri-adjacent industry have been big players in the protests and unrest.

I'm not denying that the government handled this extraordinarily poorly, I'm just saying the discussion is dominated by extremely polarised opinions.

There is all kind of ways, but farmers will tell you it also lowers yield and thus costs them money.

Its important to note that most of these farm products are exported. This is an argument about market protection, not food supply protection.

Nitrogen emissions are mostly caused by cattle, in particular cows. Beef, milk and cheese might be more expensive due to these measures, but cheaper, more sustainable food (vegetarian food/chicken/egss) would not be affected by the proposed measures.

Good point. And the price of these goods--beef in particular--is completely decoupled from the disproportionate damage it causes. If it was air pollution, we would call it a market failure.

Have you ever tried to milk a chicken though? Let me tell you, it’s frustrating and painful work, for both parties.

It's worse with pigs...

Milking oats is super easy, OTOH

And to add to this: The Netherlands is currently a huge meat producers while being a relatively small country with very high population density. In fact, 75% of dutch meat production is exported. This has therefore nothing to do with compromising Dutch food security and everything to do with Large cattle feed producers in the Netherlands fighting (with a lot of money and donations I might add) to not loose a very lucrative market.

Unfortunately from a public perception perspective they have a very easy and convincing story to tell: the story of the hardworking dutch farmer working day and night to put food on the table of Dutch society!

Exactly. And they hard working poor farmer is in reality a big multi-million euro company that's doing a lot of pollution.

They managed to lobby and gaslight so much that non-farmers believe the stories and vote for them. Which is crazy... People would not be protesting and voting to help Shell, while they're similarly trying to make a lot of money by destroying the environment.

Nitrogen fixation is mainly a problem related to livestock, 75% of livestock/meat production is exported in the Netherlands. This has nothing to do with food security...

The government should've pushed innovations in precision farming like they push solar (e.g. 50% subsidy). But they chose to do a full ban. Some startups in the sector were affected even though they reduce the amount of fertilizer and pesticides by an order of magnitude. Was the government so blind and stupid, or were they malicious?

Farmers had ~30 years to work on this.

I am also glad to see them win. I don't like to see governments railroad people without any compromise. It was "our way, or the highway". That's not constructive. 'Bout time the "small guy" (compared to the gov) won.

Compared to the government, perhaps, but there are some very big companies behind the protests, and independent farmers don't necessarily agree.

The 'small guy' are a couple of extremely rich cattle feed producers (in fact in the top 10 richest families in the country) which financed a succesfull propaganda campaign to derail this extremely necessarry piece of legislation. It is a damn shame that american type populist and big money financed misinformation campaigns are coming to the Netherlands as well...

Well, for a couple of rich guys, they seem to be the majority party in the senate.

They had literally 50 years to compromise. The first time this problem came up was in the 1970s.

So what's the alternative? Do nothing? Spend trillions to enable the poor countries to go first? How would that even work? Would it do anything other than enable the oligarchs to steal the money?

You don't ban something important without viable alternatives, that's just obvious. If we need alternatives, then you fund research or scaling of the alternatives first. That's what we've done with wind and solar and now they're super cheap.

What are you even talking about?! Nobody is talking about banning livestock production. The netherlands could literally reduce the amount of livestock in the country by 50% and still produce more meat and milk than is consumed by Dutch society, in fact we would have plenty over for export. The only reason people want to hold this legislation up is for their own monetary gains.

We're talking about nitrogen here, not livestock specifically.

Livestock are what emit most of the Nitrogen - specifically cow pee

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